--- title: "Searching and 'Feed to Listbox'" url: "https://courses.osherove.com/courses/commanding-total-commander/searching-and-feed-to-listbox.md" canonical: "https://courses.osherove.com/courses/commanding-total-commander/searching-and-feed-to-listbox/" tags: [] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Lesson 9 of 15 in Commanding Total Commander (File Ninja: Searching, Filtering and Selecting Files), 2:52. Free video by Roy Osherove." usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Searching and 'Feed to Listbox' 1. [Courses](https://courses.osherove.com/#courses) 2. [Commanding Total Commander](https://courses.osherove.com/courses/commanding-total-commander/) 3. File Ninja: Searching, Filtering and Selecting Files Lesson 9 of 15 Duration: 2:52 [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4SowKLC6-E) ## In this lesson Roy searches a folder for all .cs files with Alt-F7, and shows options to search inside archives, for text such as the word class, by date, for duplicate files and inside plugins, and to save and load searches. The feed to list box button (Alt-L) turns the results into a list of files, which he can select with Ctrl-A and zip with Alt-F5, or view one by one with Ctrl-Q. ## Transcript 467 words [\[00:02\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4SowKLC6-E&t=2s) Let's talk about searching. One of the most common things you do with files is search. And Total Commander has a very nice searching ability. So let's say I want to search in this folder in C labs. All the CS files. So I'm going to say alt f7 for to start searching. And in the search dialogue, this is a general let's say everything.cs. Now I can also search inside archives or I can even find according to text. So all the CS files that have the world the the word class inside them. [\[00:36\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4SowKLC6-E&t=36s) I can even go a bit more advanced and say only files dated let's say in the last week or not older than one days or 1 hour etc. So that way if it's a specific file that I know changed in a specific time it's much easier to find. I can even find duplicate files of the same name and same size that match the specific pattern. I can also search inside plugins and plugins are a topic we'll get into later but basically they allow to extend the ability of Total Commander and we can load and save our searches if we keep doing the same search over and over again. [\[01:19\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4SowKLC6-E&t=79s) So this is just the beginning. If we just start to search, we can see that there's a bunch of files that we found. Now, we can't do a lot with these files. I could just view the file, for example, like this through the lister, which is the default viewer. But what if I want to do something with all these files? There's a special button here called feed to list box. So, if I click this button or if I press Alt L, I'm going to get the list of files. [\[01:52\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4SowKLC6-E&t=112s) Oops, sorry, pressed a different button. I'm going to get the list of files here. And because this is just a list of files now, what happens is that you see as I move up and down, the text in the bottom changes and I can see where this file is. But let's say I want to find all these files. I can now just select all of them. Ctrl+ A and maybe just zip all of them into the same into a specific folder on the left. [\[02:22\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4SowKLC6-E&t=142s) So, alt F5. So, by feeding to list list box, we have this ability to manage the search result and actually do something meaningful. For example, pressing Ctrl Q and seeing the content of each of these files. Or we could do multiple renames which we'll look about look at in in the next videos. So that's it. A very powerful search ability for Total Commander. If you know how to use that stuff, you are almost invincible. [Previous lesson Different File Colors](https://courses.osherove.com/courses/commanding-total-commander/different-file-colors/) [Next lesson Advanced Multi File Rename](https://courses.osherove.com/courses/commanding-total-commander/advanced-multi-file-rename/) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/